Turning data ingestion into a competitive advantage for your SaaS application

Is data ingestion a challenge for your SaaS application?

Unfortunately, data integration challenges hold many SaaS applications back. This is because customers struggle to load up their existing data as well as connect all their data feeds to their application. This results in a sub-par user experience because they miss out on the breadth of data they could benefit from. It also increases costs for the SaaS vendor because of slow onboarding, and it increases their client churn rate.

Let’s take a closer look at two big obstacles to efficient data ingestion.

Then we’ll discuss how you can overcome these challenges so that data ingestion becomes an ongoing, competitive advantage.

Challenge #1: Onboarding new customers

The sooner your customers get their data on your SaaS platform, the better.

This is because you’re already paying for the infrastructure needed to support the customer, so any delay in onboarding is a needless cost. In addition to this, it’s important to give your customers a great experience that’s simple, fast, and easy to set up.

Once you’ve onboarded a customer, they can start getting value and find reasons to keep their subscription going.

Challenge #2: Integrating data feeds

Connecting and integrating customer data feeds is another challenge your SaaS application might face.

To tackle this problem, you might want to build an integration module that connects all third-party integrations. Another option is to create a universal module with an option to ‘import CSV’. However, although these methods both work, setting up these solutions manually can be time-consuming for your SaaS business.

The issues with data management

Both challenges hinder your SaaS application and prevent it from delivering the kind of customer experience you would like.

It comes back to inefficient and slow management and ingestion of data. Solutions such as integration modules can help, but it’s still a cumbersome way to handle the four stages of data ingestion. These stages are:

• Reading
• Validating
• Mapping
• Loading of data

Fortunately, modern solutions do exist. These help to simplify these four stages and accelerate data ingestion at scale.

Automate (and accelerate) data ingestion the smart way

Data ingestion, if done badly, will hinder the process of onboarding new customers and integrating their data feeds. This may diminish the value of your SaaS application and could push customers away.

However, with modern data automation tools, like CloverDX, you can build a layer between the existing data and the target platform. Tools like this take the load off of your IT teams and will effectively handle your data by:

• Accepting and transforming any incoming data without intervention
• Automating ingestion, in turn helping you to onboard more customers faster
• Connecting data however and wherever you need, whether it’s in the cloud or via an API endpoint
• Baking automatic data validation into your workflows

These tools handle a variety of different formats of data, at scale, without the need for customer intervention. It’s a smart way to bridge the gap between your SaaS application and customers that makes data ingestion pain-free.

The result? Your business enjoys higher utilization of their infrastructure, a better retention rate, and your customers can reduce their ‘time to value’ dramatically.

For more on data ingestion, watch our webinar: How SaaS companies can ramp up growth by significantly cutting client onboarding times